Securities Transaction Creating Price History Entries for Other Securities - Quicken Bug?

TORREYB

I am currently on subscription for Quicken Premier and using 2019 R18.15. Basically, I am having a problem where entering transactions for one security is creating price history entries for one or more other securities and not the correct one. As a result, it is throwing off valuations for other securities.

The only thing unusual about the transactions that I am entering is that many of them are "old" (80's and 90's). They are being entered for tax purposes and for determining cost basis.

Has anyone else encountered problems with Price History like this? If so, is there a fix or a workaround? I'd like to avoid having to manually enter all the price history after entering the transactions. It is also scary that unrelated securities are being changed.

I spoke to Quicken support for over 2 hours on this issue. The people that I actually spoke with were nice and very helpful. However, there are other people that they speak with and you don't who seem to be much less helpful. They told my support agent that the program is working the way that it is supposed to and that they don't recommend keeping transactions older than 5 years. They also said that the price history only comes from downloaded data and it can't be manually edited (which is blatantly false). They were not willing to look into this further or do anything to try to resolve the situation.

After having recently subscribed to the Quicken "service", I am very disappointed in the support that is being offered. I also believe that financial software should be nearly bulletproof and not make numerical errors. It should be able to handle history longer than 5 years and if it can't, then there should be something that prevents it from happening, not allow it and then claim that errors aren't the fault of the software.

I apologize to community users for the rant, but I spent a lot of my time today on this problem and after being a loyal customer for years, can't believe I'm stuck without a solution from a company that I'm paying for a subscription. I hope there is a chance that my frustration will make it back to company ears.

Thank you,
Torrey

Jim_Harman

The business about transactions older than 5 years and not editing the price history is clearly wrong.

Might the affected securities be related in some way to the one you are editing - merged or spun off perhaps? 

Note also that if there are gaps in Quicken's price history for a security - even long ones - Quicken assumes the price does not change until the next price history entry. So if you bought a stock in 1965 and did not sell it until 1980 and you have not entered any intermediate prices, Quicken will assume that the price was constant at the original purchase price until the day you sold it.

NotACPA

By any chance have you "cross-linked" the securities ... by using the same Symbol or  CUSIP  for both?

Also, have you tried Validating your Q data file ... in particular using the "Rebuild Investing Lots" option?

TORREYB

@Jim_Harman I appreciate verification of the price history editability. I'm glad to hear that the 5yr transaction history is not a thing either. Also, I had thought that the last price history would be used regardless of how old it is, but it is good to have verification.

@Jim_Harman and @NotACPA The securities are entirely unrelated, different mutual fund companies (with no known connection) and drastically different symbols.

@NotACPA I had done a validation during my support call, but they had me only use the first option ("Validate file"), not all options. I will try the other options and let you know what happens.

Thanks to both of you for your help so far.

TORREYB

I ran Validate with adding the option to "Rebuild investing lots" and it did not change anything. The price histories did not change and entering a transaction in one security still put price histories in different securities.

I then tried to run Validate with also adding the "Correct investment price history" as "Repair" option. That did correct the price history on the security that I've been working on. It also seems to have stopped new transactions from adding price histories to other securities. It did not remove any erroneous price history records on those other securities though.

I opted not to go further and try the "Delete and Rebuild" option for correcting the investment price history as I don't want to accidently lose things. I may just manually edit out bad data.

I think this may resolve the issue, but I'll have to watch it. I am getting one error repeatedly on Validate for the QEL file, but it didn't seem to concern Support and I'm not seeing any ill effects from it as far as I know. Maybe this is normal?
QEL:
The old file was corrupt and only some of the data has been recovered.

QEL:
All internal consistency checks passed.

Thanks,
Torrey

Jim_Harman

It's good to hear that the "Correct investment price history" Validate option seems to have fixed your problem. That is a new option introduced in the past few months.

Please let us know whether or not the problem stays fixed.